what happened after supernova?

did everyone that got neutralized with Agent N magically turn back to normal? does genissa have her powers back? are the councilmembers back together? kinda wish these questions were answered.

i thought the author was going for a 'you dont need powers to be special/to be a hero' angle with the end, and im kinda bummed with the fact that it didnt turn out that way. having everyone get their powers back kinda destroys the earlier meaning of 'even if you dont have superpowers, you can still do good' like when smokescreen was comforting red assassin in the arena. it just felt kinda hastily slapdashed together and im a little bit upset with it. still a good series though

renegades series by marissa meyer is my enemy fr. how do you write an entire trilogy about how the lines between hero/villain are deeply blurred and that the institutionalization of superheroes as a governmental power has led to corruption and abuse of power just to have the conclusion of the trilogy be the protagonist siding with the “heroes” without any systemic change. why would you write a series if you weren’t even going to follow through on its underlying premise

just finished supernova

in case it’s not clear, spoilers ahead

the anarchists were done so dirty istg

are we just going to brush over the fact that captain chromium wanted to execute a minor just to appease frostbite??? like dude *no*. nuh-uh. no thank you.

“but he was just trying to do what’s right!!” idc. the renegades were a corrupt system and he was the one to build that system. he is at fault.

(i am an anarchists apologist if you can’t tell)

((love the characters hate the politics))

adrian took one look at this girl and said someone Please let her take a nap!

finally reading Renegades and every Nova chapter is just her being so unbelievably traumatized and badly adjusted and starved of human connection and plotting the destruction of everyone around her. and then every Adrian chapter is like “wow. Nova is so cool. i hope she likes my superhero suit. i’m gonna draw something for her <3 <3 <3”

I'm torn between preordering the DD annotated book or not, I'm just nosey which tumblr users got their posts selected??

There are a few preview pages on Amazon which include some tumblr users:

Something that occurred to me when watching OSP's Dracula video is when Red says that Dracula can't work as anything but a novel, I realized that hey, maybe adaptations to film or television or theater can't capture what makes Dracula Dracula, but a video game could. There have been plenty of Draculas in plenty of games, but I think a near-identical translation of Dracula into the video game medium could be the closest we get to an actual adaptation. And specifically, one that changes styles multiple times throughout the game.

Think, we start with Jonathan Harker on his way to Castle Dracula. It's a fairly normal 3rd-person RPG that morphs into survival horror as the secrets of Castle Dracula and the Count are unearthed. Then it abruptly turns into a visual novel of Lucy and Mina exchanging letters, complete with a romance subgame with Lucy and her suitors. Interspersed throughout the game are Seward's interactions with Renfield through the lens of a puzzle game. Then we're on the deck of the Demeter in a full-on horror game as Dracula feeds on the crew.

We're back to the visual novel style as Lucy and Mina go on holiday to Whitby, which ends when Mina receives a letter about Jonathan being in Budapest. Then once again we're in a 3rd-person RPG, this time as Seward, and we are finally introduced to Abraham Van Helsing. This part of the game would incorporate the puzzle elements of the Renfield sections as we attempt to diagnose Lucy's illness.

After Lucy dies, the game shifts into a more action-focused tone for a time as we hunt down the Bloofer Lady and finally stake Lucy. After this, Jonathan and Mina return to the story and it becomes a mystery game as we track down where Dracula's coffins of earth are. Mina begins to show the same symptoms Lucy did and we get a rhythm game from Van Helsing's POV as he hypnotizes her to aid in tracking Dracula.

In the final section of the game, we follow the three groups in sequence. First, Mina and Van Helsing in a dungeon-crawl game as they reach Dracula's castle, ending in Van Helsing destroying the brides of Dracula. Second, Quincey and Seward's travel as the pair follow Dracula on land, ending with the sight of Dracula's coffin being loaded into a wagon. Third and finally, Jonathan's POV as he, Holmwood, Quincey, and Seward converge on Dracula, and the final fight of the game begins. Afterward, we see the epilogue play out and thus ends the Dracula video game adaptation.

It would probably be insane to pull off but if it were, it would be glorious.

Something about Kaz hinging his entire plan in Crooked Kingdom on the fact that no one would bother checking on a boy they assumed was dead during the plague is just so...

Like, he remembers lying in that alley with Jordie and watching people walk past and then being rolled onto a pile of corpses by bodymen and staring up at them thinking Wait. I'm still alive. and getting dumped on the Reaper's Barge anyway because no one in this city cares.

"But won't the medic check to see if he's really dead?" No. He won't.

Why don’t I hear more about undead beings coming back to warn people? It’s always zombies wanting to drag people down to join them in the grave, ghosts seeking vengeance, spirits trying to chase people out of their domains - but if you died horribly and were left rattling around some spooky mansion for eternity, wouldn’t you want to stop people from blundering into the same death you had?

You feel a cold breath on your neck as you get in the car. It won’t leave until you fasten your seatbelt. An unseen force catches your foot as you pass the fourth step every time you walk up the stairs. During a renovation, you find out the wood is rotten. You can never find a pack of cigarettes - even ones guests bring disappear from their pockets and are found weeks later on the lawn, empty. Your daughter is giggling and laughing at something unseen, chasing after it away from the cliffside on your family hike. You don’t know why, but you feel compelled to leave a spare hairband and some stickers on a picnic table as you leave the park. Tribute? A thank you? The items are gone by next time you visit, and you swear a happy child’s hum follows you home on the breeze.

…More preventative hauntings. It just makes sense.

Everyone is convinced the old house on the hill is full of evil spirits because anyone who tries to sneak in gets the ever loving shit scared out of them by the craziest poltergeist imaginable

Turns out the house had massive structural issues and was just one door-slam away from caving in on itself and the ghost was trying to keep people safe

Once the house did finally collapse the ghost moved on to the old abandoned factory that never had its industrial waste properly disposed of

Eventually the local inspection unit gave it an honorary OSHA certification

Great Mouse Detective version of Dracula happening simultaneously as the events of Dracula, so there’s just five mice in Victorian clothes unnoticed by the human cast desperately trying to kill a bat.

Or they’re also trying to kill Dracula, but exclusively during the parts of the book when he’s turned into a bat.

Dracula invited a human realtor and a mouse realtor to his castle and there were extended periods of time where he would say to his human realtor “Ah please excuse me I have business to attend to” and turn into a bat to talk to his mouse realtor.

my favorite genre is “i loved it so much and i would not recommend it to anyone” ❤️

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

i love this post

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

you know it also occurs to me that due to how - unlike twitter - we indulge in memes for weeks or months at a time, to the point of some of them becoming shorthand used for years after the fact, we also have a lot of our own oft-incomprehensible-if-translated-literally idioms, of a sort! (not PRECISELY idioms, but they’re something more than just a funny meme, a lot of times, y’know?)

AND many of them are visual idioms or w/e, is that a thing? we use specific images (or images clearly based on the original image) to indicate a certain emotion or response, often with either not enough words to actually convey the response on their own, or no words at all! But those of us fluent in this dialect know what’s meant by it and it actually communicates quite clearly. Which is hella cool. :D

Tumblr is one of those sites that’s insular enough that it’s essentially ended up coming up with a language and culture of its own, to the point where if I interact with someone online whose main social media is Twitter or Reddit I can more or less instantly tell that they’re Not From Around Here. It’s cool and a little freaky at the same time.

Tumblr is an island ecosystem and we are the finches evolving more and more highly specialized bills.

and it’s funny to see people say that prim’s death happened for “no reason.” because it’s almost like…… war of any kind inevitably causes the senseless death of thousands. and it doesn’t mean anything. yes, prim died for no reason, and that was the point.

coin only ever cared about power, it was thinly veiled as a pursuit for justice. she was fine with innocent children dying if it meant citizens would think the blood was all on snow’s hands. pair this with gale’s weapon, and the fact that prim happened to be on the front lines, and bam. innocent, senseless deaths.

that’s from an emotional standpoint, though. from a narrative standpoint, prim’s death actually DID make sense. just as rue’s death served as the catalyst that convinced katniss to die by nightlock (the act that began the rebellion), prim’s death was the catalyst that forced katniss to confront coin’s true colors. now, katniss knew that coin was really no different from snow. it all went in a circle. the rebellion started because of katniss’s love for prim, and the rebellion was won because of that same love.

and on a final note: prim’s death was foreshadowed by her name alone. a primrose is a flower that wilts shortly after blooming.

People are sleeping on how chaotic Lailah is in the background of the story. She's indirectly the cause of everything good that happens but not in like an all powerful benevolent sort of way. She's like a rube goldberg machine of inexplicably positive effects. Like a reverse Olba Meyer. She's out there metaphorically giggling to herself and pressing random buttons on the multiverse, and decades down the line instead of fracturing space time or whatever it causes interdimensional peace through the MOST ridiculous convoluted series of coincidences. Ma'am do NOT try to tell me you predicted ANY of that I SWEAR she has no idea what she's doing. Her motives are for her to know, in fact probably she doesn't have any. Heaven is like "why did you steal a piece of the tree of life. why did you give it to a crying baby demon. why did you have a half human daughter and then bail immediately. WHY do you INSIST on telling COSMIC SECRETS to RANDOS." And she's like idk, who's asking? She's just fucking around. Just doing shit. Meddling With Ancient Forces like "oooh what'll this do" and what it does is send Satan to McDonald's

Suzuno Kamazuki is such a funny character she wakes up every day in her shitty rented room next to her neighbors she's decided not to assassinate like. wow another lovely day with my good friends, 4 extraplanar warriors and a teenage girl. so glad we've all been given a second chance to embrace peace, truly #blessed. and then she goes out and solves problems with violence

One thing I was eager to watch again when Glass Onion came out was the glass scene between Miles and Duke, and it did not disappoint. In theaters, I was so sure that Duke picked up the glass, so I figured that they showed us that the first time around before revealing that’s not what happened, but no. They trick the shit out of the audience the EXACT same way they trick the characters. They just tell you that you saw something different and you believe it without question. It’s so brilliant and I just got goosebumps watching it over again and realizing how easily I had been manipulated. I love these movies.

Not only that but if you watch closely, you can see Miles stealing the gun, the as he's walking towards the bar, you can see the outline of it under his sweat. And then, as he's starting his drink mix, you also see him hidding the gun away in the bar.

Damn that is brilliant.

Ransom using the fake knife to attack Marta in Knives Out and Andi's journal blocking the bullet that would have killed Hellen in Glass Onion.

Something about how both women are saved by the eccentricities of the people who loved them. 🤌

Glass Onion (2022) + Art

Hunger Games didn’t really eat holes in my brain the way that it did for some other people but god the opening lines. The opening lines. Katniss wakes up in bed and immediately, instinctively reaches beside her, only to find the bed empty and cold. Before we even know her name – before we know literally anything about her or this world or her place in that world – we know that she loves someone. We know that she is reaching for where Prim should be, sleeping safe and warm beside her, but Prim is not there. She is not there, and her half of the bed is cold and empty. People talk about characters being “doomed by the narrative” when most of the time the character was literally just a well-foreshadowed death, but Prim WAS doomed by the narrative. It’s the very first thing we learned. It’s the most key, integral, important piece of information we’re given about everything that is about to happen: Every single choice Katniss makes is to protect her little sister, and it isn’t enough. In the end, Prim still dies. Prim was dead before the story even started. Katniss, reaching. Prim’s side of the bed was cold and empty. There is no version of this story where Prim could have been saved. Katniss, reaching. The very first thing she does in the series. She wakes, and she reaches, but Prim is already gone. THAT is how you do Doomed By The Narrative. Edit: Also it is key that there was literally nothing Katniss could have done differently. If she had not acted to save Prim, Prim would not have survived the Hunger Games. But by acting to save Prim, Katniss accidentally kicked off an entire rebellion and ultimately massively increased the amount of danger Prim was actually in. The key is that this is irrelevant. If Katniss had done literally anything differently, Prim still would have died. If Katniss had faltered or changed course at any point, Prim still would have died. There was never a point where Katniss could have changed Prim’s fate. There’s no version of this story where Prim lives to see the end of it. She’s dead before the story begins. That’s doomed by the narrative.